I'm really interested in reading first novels, and flawed novels (the former generally implies the latter), and I'm an unabashed diehard fan of DFW, so I really had no excuse not to read this book. This was published when DFW was only 25 years old, meaning he started writing it at some point during college which, as a soon-to-be college graduate, makes me feel somewhat inadequate.

It is apparent DFW was a young and inexperienced novelist when he wrote this. It's indulgent, occasionally to excess, and probably could have used an editor, or at least the discernment of a more experienced writer. But it works out for the good just as often as it works out for the bad, and in any case it makes the novel seem very personal. You can tell some of the passages in here were darlings of DFW that he just couldn't bring himself to cut, despite the fact that they didn't quite fit, which provides a lot of insight into the mind of the author. And I, being as I mentioned a diehard fan, can't get enough of that kind of insight.

There's genius here bordering on precociousness. There's silliness and absurdity clearly indebted to Pynchon. There are little stylistic quirks that show up later in DFW's writing (Andy Lang refers to his "own personal Daddy," which title Joelle Van Dyne uses almost exclusively for her own father in Infinite Jest, passages written as transcripts or screenplays) and a few that are surprisingly absent (his characteristic love of abbreviations) as well as plenty that didn't really pan out. He's still discovering his own voice which, in light of his later reputation for intense idiosyncrasy, I found very interesting.

The plot falls flat, but it isn't really the point. It seems like DFW starting out wanting to write your almost typical grandiose pomo novel, full of intentionally weird characters and branching storylines, but ended up rejecting plot in favor of characterization and philosophizing, without really finding the fine balance that more experienced authors (including himself, when he wrote Infinite Jest) can manage.

There's almost a sense of self-ridicule, too, in the frequent short-story summaries (which are like one level away from straight transcription) that litter the text. It's like DFW was vetting all these ideas he had as a younger author, and was maybe even kind of embarrassed about them but couldn't let them go, so he puts them in the text in all their contrived glory (a shy, scarf-wearing woman whose neck houses a tree-frog, a man socially crippled by his unavoidable impulse to declare his love to every woman he meets, a paralyzed theoretical dentist/boy scout leader) and pokes fun at them for being juvenile or overly depressing. But they're clever stories.

The whole novel, really, hinges on cleverness. And DFW is nothing if not a clever author. He's brimming with cleverness, an almost infuriating amount of cleverness, here. Cleverness to a fault, at times, but for the most part it's entertaining.

It isn't great, but it's likable, and it's easy to read compared to most of his other fiction. It's inspiring to me, as a writer, because it helps to further shatter the myth that great artists are born, rather than trained. Natural talent might give you an edge from the get-go but true talent takes practice. We can't all write like DFW at 21 but, hey, neither could he. But he wrote it anyway, and he published it, and it got read, even two years after his death by someone who wasn't even born yet when it was written.